Then he froze for just a moment, grabbed her hard by the arm, and thrust her behind him, both of them still on their knees. There was someone else in the room, moving with soft footsteps across the carpet. The window curtains were yanked back, the lights of the city and a rising middlemoon showing a tall woman in her nightgown. Even in the dim Sophia could see that the woman’s hair was flaming red.

“Maman!” said René, in a tone rather close to his words from Blackpot Street.

“René,” the woman said. In her voice, the name sounded like an accusation.

Sophia sat straight-backed on one end of the pale green settee in the main room of the flat, René on the other end, her discarded underskirt piled in fluffy disarray between them. Her hair was a mess but her dress was righted, shoes scattered somewhere on the floor near the windows. Madame sat enthroned in a gold-painted chair, regal in a dressing gown, looking pointedly at the underskirt. The silence stretched. Sophia wondered where Spear had gotten to. Then Madame Hasard held out a handkerchief from an outstretched hand.

“Miss Bellamy,” she said, face unreadable, “you have hair powder on your … chest.”

“Oh, please, Maman,” said René, throwing up a hand.

Sophia took the handkerchief with a smile. “Thank you, Madame Hasard, for pointing that out.” She made a show of tidying her skin before handing it back. “Is that better?”

Benoit came in with a tray, eyeing René with what Sophia thought might have been amusement. He offered a glass of wine to Madame Hasard, a mug to René, and a mug of the same to Sophia, then stepped away to hover in the background. Sophia peeked inside the mug.

“Warm milk,” said Madame Hasard. “It promotes sleep, and discourages nighttime rambling.”

“Enough, Maman,” said René, slamming down the mug alarmingly hard on a tabletop of glass. “I apologize for disturbing you. But might I remind you that you were supposed to be in prison?”

She feigned surprise. “You prefer your maman to be locked away?”

“When did you get out? Are you on the run?”

“René! You will offend the sensibilities of Miss Bellamy.”

“I do not think you are concerned with the sensibilities of Miss Bellamy!”

“If you were concerned with the sensibilities of Miss Bellamy, perhaps you would not have been ravishing her in the same room where your poor maman was trying to sleep!”

René loosened the cravat and then he was on his feet and pacing. Sophia’s eyes bounced from one powdered white head showing streaks of red to one mostly red head showing a few streaks of white. She considered saying, “No, Madame, he was only trying to skewer me with a sword,” but decided to hold her tongue. Benoit put his hands behind his back.

“Miss Bellamy,” René was saying, “is my fiancée, Maman. And by your orders, if you will remember.”

“What Miss Bellamy is remains to be seen.”

That statement stopped René’s stride. He turned on his heel to look at his mother. “Maman, why are you out of the Tombs?”

Madame Hasard sipped her wine. “I am out of that filthy place, dearest, because I signed away your fortune.”

Sophia’s eyes darted to René, and she watched shock hit him like a blow to the middle. He sat on the edge of the settee, elbows on knees, breath knocked out of him, expression uncomprehending. And then his head was down, hands on the back of his neck. When he finally looked up he said, “I was coming to get you, Maman.”

“Were you?” She sipped more wine. She was thin beneath her dressing gown, but Sophia did not know her usual build. “It seemed to be taking quite some time.”

“You signed?”

“Yes, René.”

“And what do we have left?”

“Not a franc in the city.”

“The flat?”

“LeBlanc owns the flat.”

And that, Sophia thought, explained the guard at the street level of the building. René said, “What about the ships?”

“LeBlanc does not know about the ships.”

Sophia breathed. That was good.

“And how long do we have the flat?” he asked.

“Two days, René.”

Sophia let out her breath again. They needed only one. One day, and they could do what they had to. René’s eyes met hers, but the fire had gone out of them. He leaned forward again, fingers tented over his nose, staring at the floor that now belonged to LeBlanc.

“You should feel privileged, Monsieur, to call this place your final home. Not many have seen it.” LeBlanc’s smile was long and wide.

He watched Tom push himself upright in the dirt, panting from where he’d landed on his broken ribs, then frowning as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. The room was circular, but the walls were made of bones. Old and yellowed, stacked in rise and fall patterns like layers of continuous waves caught in cross-section. The bones rose higher than could be seen, to a vast ceiling that was in shadow, hundreds of thousands of them. LeBlanc’s smile lengthened. This was a place strong with those who had accepted Fate.

Two gendarmes, still with their training patches on their uniforms, fastened Tom Bellamy’s chains around a stone pedestal in the center of the room. They backed away quickly, obviously wishing to leave.

“Where is Jennifer Bonnard?” Tom asked. His lips were cracked.

LeBlanc shook his head. He was not going to tell him that.

“Tell me where she is!”

LeBlanc turned and walked away with the lantern, the gendarmes behind him.

“Tell me!”

The echoing words gave chase as LeBlanc reverently walked pathways thick with Ancient dust, the shouts eventually dying on the air. He made a slow way back to the Tombs, the young gendarmes following soundlessly behind him. LeBlanc ordered them to stand, and when he finally stepped out of the lift and into the upper level of the prison, Renaud was there, waiting.

LeBlanc nodded. Renaud drew a sword and a knife and walked into the lift. LeBlanc listened as the young men died. Now let the Red Rook try to find her brother, he thought. And when she tried, he would have her. Exactly where she was supposed to be. As Fate had decreed.

Sophia smiled when Madame Hasard showed her to her room. It was huge and also sparsely furnished, the bed an afterthought in an ocean of pale gold carpet and a beautiful view of the Upper City. It also had an interior door. Connecting with Madame Hasard’s. Benoit brought the rest of her luggage a short time later, but before he left he stopped, turned, took her hand, and kissed it. Sophia was so surprised she said nothing, only watched as he inclined his head just a little and shut the door softly behind him.

She opened her suitcases and hung her clothes, including the underskirt with its extra weight sewn inside, humming while she did it. She put both her knives and her sword under her pillow and climbed into bed, but she had not put on a nightgown. She was wearing breeches and a loose shirt of Tom’s. She looked through exactly twenty pages of the Wesson’s Guide, flipping them regularly before she blew out the light.

She stared into the dark, motionless, envisioning again the reaction she’d seen when Madame Hasard told René that the money was gone. The way his fists had clenched on the back of his neck, the roughness of his voice that had not been from the rope. It had taken her a little time to analyze, but now she knew. What she had seen was more than shock or the loss of money. More than just pain. What she had seen was the loss of hope. And to lose hope, you must have had hope in the first place. René had been hoping to pay the fee. He’d been hoping to have her. And without the money, he thought he’d lost her. How ridiculous. What could the money have to do with it? How could René Hasard think any such thing, when it was perfectly clear that he belonged to no one but her?